What are some OFX (Open Financial Exchange) APIs?

Question

I am planning to develop a small application which displays my bank account details(like Mint.com) where I can customize the display of my own. I want to know how and where to start.

1. Where these OFX API's are available?
2. Are they free or we need to pay and get access to those API?
3. What is data format ( xml, xml/atom, json) ?
4. Any article or document to understand this requirement and start developing?
5. Any open source software where I can download the code and customize it?

If I want to develop a application like Mint.com what are the other companies provide API's other than Yoodlee? What is the pricing like?

Leesen

Answer 1

As others have mentioned, Yodlee is the only company providing a high-level interface to this kind of data. They are also fairly expensive and the API is meant for big-time products, not personal projects.

As for your OFX questions,

Q: Where these OFX API's are available?

A: http://ofx.net

Q: Are they free or we need to pay and get access to those API?

A: They are free and open. The list of server URLs are a bit more tricky to acquire. There is an open wiki-type list of OFX servers at OfxHome, but beware of copying that data wholesale as bank OFX connection information should be verified multiple times over. You obviously don't want to send customers to a trojan OFX server that a random person got inserted into ofxhome.com.

Q: What is data format ( xml, xml/atom, json) ?

A: OFX 1.* used SGML but OFX 2.* (which I've not encountered in the wild) uses XML.

Q: Any article or document to understand this requirement and start developing?

A: ofx.net has very complete specifications of the OFX protocol which is mainly an exchange of OFX-format files over https.

Q: Any open source software where I can download the code and customize it?

A: Sorry, I don't know of any C# software to talk OFX

Hope this helps, Sean

Erythema

ofxhome.com is being sunsetted Aug 2021 (and offline Aug 2022). Also, lots of years old information on there that has never been updated. If someone knows of another source of banking OFX info, please edit this answer !! – Microreader

Actually, found a massive list here; however, lots of the logon go to ncr.com, so not sure about that. – Microreader

I actually compiled that moneydance.com list. But anyone reading this and wanting to compile their own list should really build up their own directory. Trusting someone else's OFX URLs is asking for an incredibly bad security problem. All it would take is one nefarious URL and someone will be scooping up your users' online banking credentials. – Erythema

Where/how would one "build up" a list! I've contacted my banks multiple times, and got zero OFX feedback. – Microreader

Answer 2

You're welcome to check out my OFXlib I created on the fly. May not be complete, but feel free to branch and change my code

https://github.com/tophathacker/OFXlib

Wrung

Looks useful (and dirty). As it stands however, this is a link only answer. Add the last two sentences from the GitHub README.md and I'd delete this comment. – Lentigo

Answer 3

Any open source software where I can download the code and customize it?

LibOFX might be useful: http://libofx.sourceforge.net/

It's an open source implementation of the OFX specification.

Necessitous

Answer 4

It sounds like you want to do an account aggregation application. If that is the case I would recommend looking into an existing service that would handle the task of account aggregation and all you would need to do is call into their API to gather the pre-aggregated data.

Yodlee is actually what Mint.com uses for account aggregation

Granted if this is going to be your own personal application yodlee will be not an option for you.

Interdigitate

Answer 5

OFX is an XML format. You can use the schema from the OFX site to generate a strongly-typed dataset.

Mulch

Answer 6

I'm not sure what Yodlee's latest pricing on their SDK is (http://yodlee.com/solutions_dv_pfmsdk.shtml) but another data provider is CashEdge AllData. They were just recently used by HelloWallet.com (a service similar to Mint): http://www.prweb.com/releases/2010/03/prweb3700584.htm

I definitely know that Yodlee is the leader in the space when it comes to # of users, # of institutions supported, etc.

Asaph

Yodlee is not cheap. They charge a minimum of $10k per year, irrespective of users. If you're servicing millions of users like Mint.com is, then ok, but they pretty much set their pricing to keep out the little guys. – Benisch